Tourist Attraction in San Salvador:
Catedral Metropolitana de San Salvador
The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Santissimo Salvatore is the main church of the Catholic archdiocese of San Salvador. The cathedral site is the site of the old Santo Domingo temple. The church was visited twice by Pope John Paul II who said that the cathedral was "intimately allied with the joys and hopes of the Salvadoran people". During his visits in 1983 and 1996, the Pope knelt and prayed before the tomb of Archbishop Óscar Romero, assassinated in 1980, whose grave here is a great fate of pilgrims. President Barack Obama visited the cathedral and tomb during his trip in March 2011 in Latin America. At the end of December 2012, the archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, ordered the removal of the ceramic tiled wall of the cathedral without consulting the national government or the artist, the Salvadoran master Fernando Llort. The workers have chipped and destroyed all 2,700 tesserae of the mural. The festive and colorful façade surrounds a sanctuary with an image of the Divine Savior of the world (Jesus, after the Transfiguration, the patron saint of El Salvador) sculpted by Fra Francisco Silvestre García in 1777. The high altar presents an image of the Divin Salvatore donated by the Holy Roman Empire Charles V in 1546. The image rests on a four-poster canopy surrounded by images of the prophets Moses and Elijah, who take part in the history of the Transfiguration. The high altar is surrounded by eight large paintings depicting scenes from the life of Christ painted by Andrés García Ibáñez. Above all, the bright dome of Churrigueresque is 148 feet tall, with a radius of 79 feet. Word processing: Giovambattista Spagnuolo (Myooni)